Contemporary Meets Colonial

A designer gives life to old-world forms in his new California house

Living in a modernist house can be an unfulfilling exercise in editing and restraint, particularly for someone who loves rooms that "give people a lot to look at," says . The interior designer and his partner, Dan Holland, found this out a decade ago when they bought a glass house in the town of Glen Ellen, California, to use as a weekend retreat from their home base in San Francisco. Beneath the low, sloping A-frame roof, fixed louvered windows ran from floor to ceiling along the entire front and back of the structure. "I put as many antiques and old, crusty pieces in it as I could, but the lack of wall space forced me to stop," Printy says.

It took a few years before the couple fully realized what they were missing. "I've always wanted to live in a house that feels as though it has been around forever," says Printy, "but has been renovated for the 21st century." The pair scoured Sonoma County for just such a place: a classic American barn or a rambling farmhouse, the architectural and aesthetic opposite of their spartan retreat. When nothing turned up, they decided to build. Printy, a former art director for Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma, wasn't going to let a small detail like new construction derail his desire for a traditional house. "At that job, I spent my days creating illusions of patina," he says. Still, they realized they were working with a blank slate. "We saw that we could create something lasting," says Holland.

For Printy, it was a chance to explore an obsession with Dutch architecture that grew out of his first trip to Amsterdam more than 10 years ago. The most compelling Dutch farmhouses, he discovered, were not found in the Netherlandish countryside, but had been built by settlers of the western cape of South Africa in the 17th century. Visiting the ornately gabled Cape Dutch farmsteads that dot the Cape Winelands region, Printy was charmed. "The landscape felt so familiar to me, as if I were at home," he says. "And the architecture complemented it beautifully, which was key."

Striving to stick as closely as possible to an original Cape Dutch design, Printy copied the simple floor plan that is a signature of the style: The rectangular ground floor is symmetrically divided into three sections. The living area's soaring 28-foot ceiling, however, is a nod to the open plan the couple had grown to love in their previous home. The exterior is clad in climate-friendly stucco and black slate, rather than the traditional whitewash and thatched roof of Cape Dutch architecture. To age the interior, Printy headed to his native Iowa, where he found most of the reclaimed flooring, beams, fixtures, doors, hardware, and cabinetry—as well as the pool's charming porticoed pump house—that give the place its timeworn beauty.

Furnishing a space with such arresting light and scale could prove to be a lesser decorator's undoing, but if Printy learned one lesson from living in a minimalist box, it was the art of editing. "I didn't want any single piece to overpower the structure itself," he says. "None of the furniture needed to make a grand statement." What he did require was that the couple "absolutely love" whatever came into the house. Indeed, there's no shortage of cherished pieces. Printy even "figured out a way to fall in love with" the Victorian rosewood chair in the entryway, an heirloom passed down from Holland's grandmother—he stained it and reupholstered it in cowhide. The pair of living room sofas, on the other hand, was custom made to suit the space's cathedralesque proportions; each one is nine feet long and four feet deep. Still, Printy made sure they'd achieve subtlety by upholstering them in black denim turned inside out.

For a guy who struggles with limitations, choosing a palette could have been a nightmare. But as with his modern home, Printy let the architecture dictate. Nearly every wall is white, the better to emphasize the weight and beauty of the beams and trusses and to take advantage of the light that floods every room. Indeed, such a noncompetitive color scheme blurs the line between indoors and out. "One morning last fall, I looked up from my desk to see three hot-air balloons coming up over the horizon," says Holland, a psychologist and leadership coach. "It felt as though I were right out there with them."

It only took a few experiences like that to confirm the couple's plans to abandon the weekend commute from San Francisco (though they still maintain a pied-à-terre in the city). Printy set up his office in a cupola-crowned clapboard barn they built on the property, and which he designed in the spirit of an 18th-century Shaker structure. "My clients love having meetings here," says Printy. "And I must admit I'm thrilled when they're shocked to learn that all of these buildings are new."

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